"I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme." -- Henry James

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Daily Dose

From Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

LONDON

“One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night,
Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable
pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a
warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles
dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria
Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so,
making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every
moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries
sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt
with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason:
they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in
the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans,
sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the
triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane
overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.”